I’ve tried adding more popper effects to the basic Advance cards. I’m trying poppers that are worth points at the end of the game. Something like: “Demonology 2+: Set this card aside. It is worth +1 VP at the end of the game.” The wording will need to be updated.
Live Notes
The Dark Deeds are now in an open area for you to draw from. This works well for the free Scheme you get at the start of your turn, if you don’t have the max amount of Dark Deeds. This means that the Scheme action that you take on your turn needs to be updated. It should be stronger. Like you may replace all the shown Dark Deeds
When Kuri played his first “Advance a Dark Deed” card, he placed that card onto the Dark Deed. This is wrong, but is definitely intuitive, so I’ll need to watch out for that.
The popper that let me keep a card for 1VP felt fun to play.
Verse Pacing
The pacing of revealing the second verse feels much slower here. With the current system, if the players play slower and don’t complete Dark Deeds right away, it will take ages for other verses to show up. Since these other verses also speed up the game, a slow game becomes even slower. Maybe a better system for advancing the verses could be found.
Shuffle verse cards into the deck? We tried this and it seems like a good idea, but the setup might be tedious. We also ended up revealing both the 2nd and 3rd verses at the same time, which I didn’t like the pacing of. Maybe it isn’t shuffled like Pandemic, but just explicitly put into the deck. EG: “Place the a random Middle Verse in the 12 position. Then place a random End Verse 12 below that.”
I feel like there should be more poppers at level 1. Spending two turns leveling up a discipline to get the lowest bonus feels like too much investment for some pretty minor effects.
More Notes
It feels like the cool cards are too rare. I think right now they are about 1/3 of the deck.
The “newest Dark Deed” popper bonus is annoying to keep track of.
The timing of the When Complete of Dark Deeds should happen before the stored cards are discarded. Otherwise the “take the top card of the discard pile” reward is too random.
The Dark Deed that lets you search for a card to add to your hand is too weak at needing 5 cards and only giving 3 points.
Post Game Notes
The terminology for store/advanced was confusing. Cards being exhausted didn’t come up often enough to need to differentiate between storing (which can be on non-exhausted) and advancing (which cannot).
Because you fill up with Dark Deeds pretty quickly, it didn’t feel good to go through the phase list and go “welp, not doing that” to the first item every turn.
The “Scheme” action felt like it wasn’t worth doing because you’d be too far behind.
Not a lot of player interaction.
One of the poppers would have slowed me down, and he didn’t feel that was worth it when weighed against moving him forward.
General To Do
Reduce the number of “basic” cards.
Write a new Scheme action that is more fun and powerful.
Write rules for how to put the prophecy verses into the main deck.
Remove the “newest Dark Deed” targetter.